When it comes to comfort, not much beats zoning. In fact, many industry experts tout that once homeowners have experienced the comfort zoning has to offer, they will never own another house without it.

Over a year of research and design went into the 2018 Dealer Design Awards gold-winning product in the Residential Controls category. After listening to feedback from both contractors and consumers for a more basic, easy-to-use, and cost-effective thermostat, Nest created the Nest Thermostat E.

Dick Foster has been preaching the positives of zoning for years. As the owner of ZoneFirst, he has dedicated his life and career to this technology, and it has been a bit of an uphill battle.

The project team and property management realized they needed to maximize open space for use by hotel guests. They chose LG’s Multi V™ 5 and Multi V™ S VRF systems, noted for energy efficiency and flexibility in design and installation options.

Products are emerging that help simplify homeownership.

What is the best approach to providing a holistic smart home experience for consumers?

If zoning technology was available before the pandemic, why has it taken so long for it to become an option that homeowners now consider?

Posted by Gordon Fyodor Lyon on May 05

In this showcase, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest cooling equipment available for the upcoming summer season in order to help contractors distinguish between brands.

As people around the world prepare to celebrate Earth Day, it’s a good time to incorporate renewable energy solutions, like Thermal Energy Networks (TENs), into the ongoing conversation.

Contractors must be careful when sizing heat pumps for colder climates in order to avoid mold problems and homeowner discomfort.

To meet the ambitious environmental goals being proposed at all levels of government, residential air-to-water heat pumps are emerging as a transformative solution to lower carbon emissions, enhance energy efficiency, and reduce utility bills.

What are the most common mistakes in heat pump installs, and how do you avoid them? Here’s what experts had to say about heat pump installation — a must-watch as electrification continues to gain momentum.

Every year, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest heating equipment that is available for the upcoming winter season.

Every year, The ACHR NEWS introduces the latest heating equipment that is available for the upcoming winter season.

Two major HVAC industry organizations have weighed in on a DOE proposal that would phase out noncondensing gas furnaces for consumer use beginning in about six years.

Cold climate heat pumps were on full display on the AHR show floor and manufacturers were eager to share their progress reports in the Department of Energy’s CCHP Challenge.

BlocPower, a climate technology company focused on greening America's buildings, announced a fundraising round of $150 million, including more than $24 million of Series B corporate equity led by VoLo Earth Ventures and $130 million of debt financing led by Goldman Sachs.

The residential heating showcase is designed to help HVAC contractors learn about the new heating equipment that is available for the upcoming cooler months.

The biggest tip is that combustion analysis should be the first and last thing completed during any heating appliance repair.

Due to a lack of training, time constraints, and numerous other reasons, many HVAC contracting companies are not performing combustion testing, potentially compromising customers’ safety.

The final rule from the U.S. Department of Energy, issued recently, requires newly manufactured indoor residential gas furnaces to be at least 95% efficient starting in December 2028, meaning furnaces made after then will have to be condensing models.

Taking a look at the major concerns around replacing an 80% furnace with a high-efficiency one such as venting requirements, drilling extra holes, and financial costs.

The residential heating showcase is designed to help HVAC contractors learn about the new heating equipment that is available for the upcoming cooler months.

Posted by Ramu Burra via dev on Oct 31

Posted by Daniel Miller on Oct 31

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Sep 30

Posted by Dave Aitel via Dailydave on Nov 02

This is the first episode (actually, episode zero) of software engineering radio. The episode does not contain real content, rather, Markus explains what the podcast is all about.

In this episode Michael and Markus talk about patterns. Starting with some of their "most used" patterns, they go into some detail about the history of patterns. They then discuss the various pattern forms as well as some misconceptions about patterns. Other topics include the domains that are covered by patterns as well as pattern languages.

Eberhard and Markus discuss the important topic of associations and dependencies in this show. While OO languages provide direct support for subtyping, most don't provide a first-class construct for other relationships between objects. The discussion elaborates on the problem and looks at various remedies, most importantly, dependency injection.

In this episode we talk with Doug Schmidt. Doug is a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University and a well-respected authority in the fields of middleware, patterns and model-driven development. In this interview we talk about these topics in the context of distributed, realtime embedded (DRE) systems.

In this Episode, Alexander and Markus talk about scripting languages. Topics include the definition of what a scripting language is, typical usage scenarios, performance issues, programming styles and IDE support. In later Episodes we will talk about more specific topics, such as dynamic typing, reflection, functional programming as well as specific languages such as Ruby.

In this Episode, Eberhard and Markus provide an introduction to Model-Driven Software Development. Since the discussion turned out to be too long, we separated things into two episodes, thus Episode 6 will be the second part of this discussion. In this first part we disucsss core concepts of MDSD, the relationship to MDA, and hint at a couple of tools.

After discussing some of the more technical aspects of MDSD in the last episode, we take a look at other important topics in this one. This includes some tips on how to introduce MDSD into projects and how the development process has to be adapted for this to work, as well as a look at the return on investment for MDSD. The relationship of MDSD and Agile software development is also discussed. Finally, we take a look at offshoring in the context of MDSD.

This week, Arno and Markus take a look at error handling at the architectural level. They discuss the different kinds of errors, the groups of people who need to know about them and proven high-level approaches. Later episodes will investigate more technical aspects of error handling, such as idioms for using exceptions or a discussion of checked vs. unchecked exceptions.

Eric Evans is the author of the well known Domain-Driven Design book. In his day job he works as a consultant and coach for his own company, Domain Language. In this interview, Eric talks about the essential building blocks of domain-driven design as well as about a set of best practices on how to address complex projects. In a third part, he elaborates on the relationship of domain-driven design and MDSD/MDA.

This Episode as well as the next one take a look at remoting infrastructures such as CORBA, .NET Remoting or Webservices. In this first part we will take a look at why remote communication is necessary in the first place, what remoting middleware can do for you as well as which other middleware technologies exist in addition to OO-RPC systems, such as messaging middleware. Finally, we conclude with a brief overview of what the broker pattern can do for us in the context of remoting middleware.

This is the second part of the remoting infrastructures discussion started in Episode 9. We take a look at how remoting infrastructures such as CORBA, .NET Remoting or Web Services work internally. This includes the low level details of the transport layer, marshalling, client proxies as well as interceptors and asynchronous communication. At the end, Michael will explain how all this relates to CORBA and Markus will map the concepts to .NET remoting. We don't have additional links in these show notes since all the relevant links had been posted for Episode 9 already.

In this Episode we have the pleasure of talking with Gregor Kiczales. Gregor is one of the fathers of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). Today he is a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. Back in his days at Xerox Parc, he and a number of other people worked on the early forms of AOP as well as on some of its forerunners, such as meta object protocols. In this interview, we talk about a number of interesting topics, such as the history of AOP, the relationship of AO to interceptors, the industry acceptance of AOP, early aspects (i.e. using AO in development phased before implementation) as well as adoption strategies for AOP.

This is the first part of a series of Concurrency episodes. In this part Alex and Michael motivate and introduce the topic. We explain fundamental terms, such as thread, process, or mutex and dicuss typical challenges, such as deadlocks and race conditions.

Ruby has been getting more and more attention by the developer community over the last couple of years. Nevertheless Ruby as language and as a plattform is not too widespread. Most developers don't know people who have actually done commercial Ruby projects. Therefore it is sometimes hard to judge if Ruby is just a hype topic or if Ruby can be used for serious projects today. In this episode Alexander speaks with Thomas Quas about a commercial Ruby project Thomas finished a while ago. Thomas shares his insights and practical experiences with Ruby doing a project under strong time pressure. As Thomas has many years experience doing Java projects we also do some high level comparisons between both platforms.

In this Episode we talk to Ted Neward. Since Ted is active in the .NET and Java universes, we started out by discussing some of the differences between the two platforms. The main discussion, however, focussed on new features in the C# 3.0 language. These include LINQ (language-integrated query). A very interesting discussion about extension methods, lamda expression, typing (dynamic, duck, compiler) and other language "tricks" follows. We also visited the topic of language development on the .NET and Java platforms in general, also looking at topics such as concurrency and the Scala language.

A very important area for Java are Enterprise Systems. With the advent of new technologies like Ruby on Rails, Java EE 5 or EJB 3 the landscape for Enterprise Systems appears to be changing a lot at the moment. In this episode Markus talks with Eberhard about what Enterprise Java actually is, why and where it is used. Based on that they discuss what the future might look like and how to make Enterprise Java shine in the future.

This episode provides a hands-on guided tour through a simple model-driven software project. It is based on an actual code sample (see link below) and takes a look at the typical steps of real-life code generation: prototypical implementation, defining the metamodel, reading a model into a metamodel instance, writing templates and validating the model. The example for the episode uses openArchitectureWare as a generator environment, but the overall approach is tool independent. This episode is the first in a new category "code/technology" that discusses technical concepts based on actual code. Please give feedback whether you find this format useful or not.

This is a short episode that outlines the upcoming episodes and interviews, as well as reports on some listener feedback.

In this episode Michael and our guest Prashant Jain talk about patterns for resource management. Efficient management of resources is critical in the execution of any kind of software. Ranging from embedded software in a mobile device to software in a large enterprise server, it is important that the resources, such as memory, threads, file handles, or network connections, are managed efficiently to allow the systems to function properly and effectively. Michael and Prashant discuss various patterns, such as Lazy Acquisition, Caching, Leasing and Evictor and explain when, why, and how to apply them for effective resource management.

In this second part of our concurrency series Michael and Alexander talk about basic patterns for concurrent programming, such as Active and Monitor Object, Scoped Locking and Futures. Further, they discuss some architectural considerations regarding the number of threads and resource usage in general. For more information, see the references for part one as well as the following links

In this Episode, we talk to Michael Stal, a Senior Principal Engineer at Siemens Corporate Technology, POSA 1 and 2 Co-Author and Editor of the german JavaSpetrum magazine. Since Michael's core focus is middlware, much of our discussion centered around that topic. Webservices and SOA, of course, have also been covered. Other topics include Java vs. .NET as well as Patterns.